my name is Fred drasa I am a senior I'm the president and chief engineer of the chipa racing Formula SAE team and my senior design project is the rear suspension on a Formula SAE car what interests me about the rear suspension is how many kinematic relationships there are within one system I've always been a fan of kinematics wasn't always a huge fan of like thermodynamics and things like that so as far as kinematics go it really gave me an opportunity to work with something that I liked uh you have the motion of the push rods the can levers along with the motion of this added sway bar that we have so there's a lot of different things in one system that are working together to make the suspension work the way that it should a lot of the components for this year's suspension will remain the same as last year's suspension the same components that we're going to use are essentially the push rod the canal LA and the shock we'll be keeping those the same we'll also be adding a sway bar which goes through the back and the sway bar link which connects the sway bar to the Canon lever one component that is changing but it's not new is our tow adjuster is moving from the bottom to the top for easier access generally what's changing with the suspension system is that this is all up and down in one plane parallel to a bunch of planes between chassis our new can of lever is actually going to be mounted on an oblique plane farther up here on an angle like this to where the motion of the tire will be going up and it's going to push the can of lever backwards our shock is then mounted to the back of the frame and it will be pushed backwards and compressing the shock this way a major component that's going to be changing here is that we have no sway bar here on the existing car next year we'll be incorporating a sway bar which will be attached in the back by two points it will run the length of the car and it will be connected by a lever to this canal lever which will have a fourth point on it so when that tire comes up it's going to push the can lever push the shock back and ultimately push that um rollar backwards and when that rollar pushes backwards it's actually going to go to the other side and put the weight equally on the other shock to keep the car from Rolling here's the design of the new rear suspension as you can see we have some of the same components the push rod the can lever and the shock they are mounted on an oblique plane not straight up and down like last year so that's a new piece um some of the new parts are this sway bar link which actually attaches to the can lever and then the sway bar which attaches to the back of the frame and when I move this Canon lever simulating the tire going up and down it moves the roll bar and creates a torsion in that roll bar to keep the car from Rolling so this roll bar is going to put the pressure press from this tire onto both of these shocks and it's going to keep the car from Rolling so this simulation here is the movement through the entire stroke of the suspension when the car will be driving for testing of the suspension components we run FAA on all of our CAD Parts before we even make them so we design them we run our FEA on these parts uh based on the material that they're made of and we make sure that there's no excessive deflection and no yielding in these parts before we even manufacture them once we manufacture them we put them on the car and we have two weeks of testing devoted Before the Race even starts so we drive the car around and if something does yield components on the suspension are pretty easy to remake as far as a timeline goes for this project we started at the beginning of this year for our design phase it's a 2-year two semester senior design project and the first semester is for design and the second semester is devoted to manufacturing our manufacturing will be done within the first month of us getting back to school so our design portion is pretty much done and we are actually working on how we're going to manufacture some of these components for next [Music] semester